Free Home Free by Marni Jackson Page B

like a hydroelectric generator. In the lane, the garbage was lashed down with bungee cords. I slept soundly that night.
    When I came down the next morning, I made French-press coffee and took the paper outside to my table.
    Silence.
    This time the raccoons had dragged the pump, still running, into the weeds behind the lilac tree. Now the motor had burned out. Another $280 down the drain.
    Finally, I ceded the pond to the raccoons, but this episode led to an escalating neglect of the whole backyard. I no longer flossed the flagstones or staked the clematis. Every once in a while, I would go on a defoliating rampage, pulling up the spearmint that had overtaken one side, and whacking back the roses, tiny starved blossoms at the end of great pole-vaulting shoots. Then that stopped too.
    Whenever I feel my environment getting out of control, I decide I have “more important things” to do—writing books, ordering bathing suits online, etc. My field of vision begins to iris in until I only see what I need to. I can find the scissors in the kitchen drawer, but I don’t notice the 22 wine corks. I see the last bit of goat cheese hiding in the refrigerator, but not the furry chutney at the front.
    This carelessness is something that our son doesn’t share, despite his own deliberate spheres of chaos. He has always been quietly disappointed by the amount of rot that goes on at the back our refrigerator, with its tubs of boutique olives languishing in their brine. I think our ability to live with a certain amount of entropy—to not take care of things —strikes him as a moral failing, and he may have a point. We waste a lot of food, because leftovers aren’t . . . fresh.
    Brian especially fetishizes freshness, which I suspect is a remnant from his English background, where you go round to the shops every day, chat with the shopkeepers, and leave with some nice pink chops. Fish must be glistening and bright-eyed, barely off life support. His standards for raspberries are also high; at the first little wisp of mould, he’s out the door to buy fresher, dewier, ones. (There is a sexual metaphor here that I’m not going to pursue.)
    Our domestic blind spots are ironic given that we’re journalists, paid to notice details. We can catch the smallest continuity glitch in a movie while overlooking the broken security light above the barbecue, the one that has been swinging open since we moved in.
    This would have appalled my engineer father. When I was growing up,we had a Kenmore dryer that ran for 30 years. Twenty years in, it began to make a funny noise, but “if you just put a drop of oil in the motor before you use it, it works perfectly,” he would say. We got another decade of use out of it before the lint in the lint catcher finally caught fire and filled the basement with smoke.
    Still. It was the thought that counted: the caretaking.
    Now, whenever our son is due for a visit home, I cast a critical eye on the garden and inside the fridge. I want not to disappoint him. If he catches me with greasy black parsley in the crisper, I will feel derelict. It’s not that he’s a prim environmental nag; what I think he means is, pay attention . See what’s really there in front of you, not just what you want to see. This applies to our relationship with him, too.
    We blame our not-seeing on our deadlines and tunnel vision (the writer’s one-size-fits-all excuse). It’s also our leftover 1960s notion that we have better things to do than to Scotchgard the sofa or tend to worldly things.
    On the other hand, at 23 Casey has no interest in acquiring things; his belongings can be stored in several milk crates, three guitar cases, and a backpack. He has more amplifiers than furniture. He’s frugal, but frugality can also be a sort of inverted materialism, one that confers too much negative power to “stuff.” For a long time, he considered shampoo a consumerist ruse and